Source: The Daily
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The Pivot Project -
Five UW graduate students designed a way to convey information to victims of
human trafficking without being suspected by their captors, in the form of a
paper hidden inside the packaging of sanitary pads, which can then be
flushed down the toilet to avoid detection.
human trafficking without being suspected by their captors, in the form of a
paper hidden inside the packaging of sanitary pads, which can then be
flushed down the toilet to avoid detection.
Photo by The Pivot Project | Courtesy Photo
The Pivot Project
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A female victim of forced labor — whether in agricultural, sexual, or another form of bondage -— has a few moments of privacy in the bathroom. She opens a sanitary pad, a seemingly normal item used in everyday life, an object a trafficker would likely not deem threatening. However, tucked within the package is a means of escape: a number, disguised as a fortune-cookie tab, she can call to seek out help and free herself from slavery. And after she leaves the restroom, the rest of the product is flushed down the toilet due to it being printed on water-soluble paper, while she now has been given the resources to transform her life.
Five UW graduate students in the school of art’s division of design have used the innovation of design to turn such an idea into reality and combat human trafficking. The Pivot Project, named for its role as a pivotal point in the lives of victims, was created to combine design with social change and make an impact for those experiencing forced servitude.
“Washington state is actually deeply entrenched in the whole area of human trafficking because we’re a gateway state since we’re on the coast, Canada is bordering us, and there is a major metropolitan area,” said Kari Gaynor, one of the design students who created the project. “We chose to focus on trafficking since it’s such an atrocious crime, and design isn’t really being used in that area to address it.”
The other students involved in the project are Josh Nelson, Melanie Wang, Mike Fretto, and Adriel Rollins.
“What got us interested was we found a supposed statistic that Washington state was ranked third in America for human trafficking, but we never verified that or found any information behind it,” Nelson said.
As the students tried to seek out information to better understand the phenomenon of human trafficking, they were frustrated by the contradictory information available, with trafficking largely being sensationalized by the media. To better understand the issue, they reached out to the Washington Anti-Trafficking Response Network (WARN).
WARN provided the students with two important pieces of information: First, trafficked people are not typically rescued out of their situation, but instead are encouraged to seek out help. And second, the process of self-rescue comes in a myriad of forms, like having a conversation with a potentially trafficked individual.
“What we do is be here when someone is ready for our services,” said Kathleen Morris, the program manager for WARN. “Our clients come out of trafficking situations on their own or reach out for serviceswhen they no longer want to be in that situation. It’s hard for someone to leave an abusive situation, and so we’ve found is that the most effective way for us to serve people is to be available when they need us. We really try to work with them on their terms.”
The students also sought to address the sensationalism around human trafficking, a major problem that can have a detrimental impact on tangibly addressing and combating this problem.
“Some of the misconceptions is that all trafficking occurs in the commercial sex industry, which is not accurate,” Morris said. “Some people think it only happens in other countries, and that’s obviously not accurate. People tend to sensationalize the issue, so we try to explain the form of trafficking that we see in Washington state and across the U.S. and talk about realistic ways to reach vulnerable populations.”
According to Morris, a common form of trafficking in Western Washington is domestic servitude, with a person being treated like a slave while in a suburban, middle-class neighborhood, an environment where many would assume such practices could never exist.
The Pivot Project is using their message to target two specific trafficked groups: people forced into prostitution and people forced into agricultural trafficking. Gaynor said their messages have been printed in both English and Spanish and incorporate language and images that evokes trust to encourage victims to call the number.
“It has to be treated with a lot of care because as soon as you engage with that person you’re putting them at risk,” Nelson said. “We need to get them information that is critical to their well-being and deliver it in a way that they can understand and take care to not put them at risk. We had this idea about a feminine product: There’s a moment around this when a women is likely to be alone, less likely to get in trouble, and she can also think and reflect on her own situation.”
Due to their efforts, the Pivot Project won the 2013 Design Ignites Change Idea Award and is also a finalist in the Industrial Designers Society of America’s IDEA competition.
The team used the money from the award to start producing the sanitary pads on a larger scale and begin distribution.
“It is important for us to target who is receiving these pads since it could potentially put someone in danger,” Gaynor said. “It is not just men trafficking women but also women trafficking men. We wanted to make sure we got the right distribution channels in reach to distribute these to people who are potential victims or potentially trafficked individuals.”
The students first became interested in using design to solve social issues after taking a graduate seminar course about alternative design taught by Tad Hirsch, assistant professor of interaction design in the school of art.
“At the end of the quarter, they approached me and said they wanted to keep working with me and do something design-oriented,” Hirsch said. “I had, since arriving at UW, been wanting to start a kind of studio within the school of art that would focus on socially engaged design work, so it was the perfect kind of match. They were motivated and excited, so it all came together.”
Hirsch now serves as the advisor of the Pivot Project and also established the Public Practice Studio on campus as a way to bring together research and design to tackle pressing local, national, and global issues.
“We come at an issue like human trafficking and our approach is, ‘What we can do here?’ What design can do really well is work with scientists and researchers and policy makers and advocacy and work with these groups. But, what we can do is take those different perspectives and boil them down to a concrete kind of intervention,” Hirsch said. “The kinds of work we do have immediacy to it. We had to know what the experience of a victim is like, that community health clinics routinely give out sanitary pads. We are good at synthesizing information and turning it into concrete intervention that hopefully can make a difference.”
The project is still currently in a pilot stage, but based on positive feedback from WARN and other anti-human trafficking network organizations, Hirsch thinks the project will make a difference.
The winners of the Industrial Designers Society of America’s IDEA competition will be announced July 1.
“Thinking about items [the students] could create through design that could actually come into contact with potential victims so those people could better seek services, that to us is the most powerful type of impact that can happen,” Morris said. “If the design students that work on this project are informed by the right people, I think the sky is the limit.”
Reach reporter Nicole Einbinder at news@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @NicoleEinbinder
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